May 7, 2011 -- The US has proclaimed its success in its decade-long hunt
for Osama bin Laden, culminating in the killing of bin Laden by US military
operatives in a house in Abbotabad in Pakistan. As the televised triumphalism
and images of hyper-nationalist celebrations in the US fade, however, Washington's
heroic narrative is being subjected to uncomfortable questions.

Ironically, Osama bin Laden’s death has come, not in the wake of 9/11
when he was at the peak of his strength, but at a time when bin Laden and his al Qaeda
were effectively sidelined in an Arab world that is witnessing a democratic
awakening and upsurge. This fact too robs the US narrative of some of its
sheen.

May 7, 2011 -- Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal -- In the first four days after Osama Bin Laden’s assassination by US forces, the mass reaction in Pakistan is very mixed. In Punjab there is a general sympathy towards bin Laden, however not many are expressing it openly. In Sindh, the responses differ in different cities. For example, in Karachi there is more active commiseration for bin Laden and condemnation of the US attack.

Surprisingly, not much happened in Khaiber Pakhtoonkhawa, where bin Laden was killed. Similarly, Baluchistan responded meekly against the killings. However the reaction against the attack on the compound in Abbotabad is growing and it will spread to other areas. Many religious fundamentalists fled Afghanistan and took refuge in Baluchistan and Khaiber Pakhtoonkhawa. They ruled those provinces from 2002 to 2008.

March 29, 2011 -- ABC Radio's Big Ideas -- In 2008, Obama could do no wrong. To the
educated middle class, he was an intelligent and reflective writer who
had penned his own insightful memoir. To the conservative elite, he was
a Harvard graduate and expert in constitutional law. To the young
people who came out in droves to vote for him, he liked the same TV
shows, listened to the same music and "got" social networking.

It is an honest account of Hicks’ life as a youngster
and his torture at the hands of the US army. Contrary to what many
of the mainstream reviews of Guantanamo:
My Journey assert, Hicks
goes into a lot of detail about why and how he first ended up in
Pakistan, and then Afghanistan. He explains, in detail, the
circumstances of how he became trapped in Afghanistan and his
attempts to get back his Australian passport to be able to return
home to Adelaide.

Hicks was like so many teenagers looking for adventure.
He was also a confused young man, coming from a broken home when
he was just nine years old and finding it difficult to find his
place in his second family with his stepmother and stepbrothers.

February 10, 2011 – Links International
Journal of Socialist Renewal/Green Left Weekly -- “The situation in Egypt is different than the
situation of Sudan”, government spokesperson Rabie A. Atti insisted to
reporters following January 30 anti-government protests. “We don’t have one
small group that controls everything. Wealth is distributed equally. We’ve
given power to the states.”

Above: young woman protester in Egypt. "The protests have been led by educated young people frustrated by
poverty and lack of political freedom."

By Tony Iltis

January 30, 2011 -- Green Left Weekly -- Having started with a fearless uprising for democracy and economic
justice that is sweeping the Arab world, 2011 is shaping up to be a
decisive year for the Middle East. By January 14, the first dictator had already been overthrown: Zine El Abidine Ben Ali of Tunisia. Egypt's Hosni Mubarak looks set to follow.

Protests inspired by the Tunisian revolution have occurred in several
Arab countries, repeatedly in Yemen and Jordan. On January 28, the
Middle East’s most populous country, Egypt, was rocked by riots after
police tried brutally, but unsuccessfully, to end four days of protest
against the 30-year-old dictatorship of Hosni Mubarak.

Tonight’s State of the Union sent the message one final time that the Obama presidency was and is designed to protect the privileges accrued by the richest 5% in society. Obama lived up to the characterisation of him as a “hedge-fund Democrat”, a politician assigned the task of deflecting the real demands of the people for a society and economy based on solidarity, peace and justice.

December 15, 2010 -- Salon -- Bradley Manning, the 22-year-old US Army private accused of leaking
classified documents to WikiLeaks, has never been convicted of that
crime, nor of any other crime. Despite that, he has been detained at
the US Marine brig in Quantico, Virginia for five months -- and for
two months before that in a military jail in Kuwait -- under conditions
that constitute cruel and inhumane treatment and, by the standards of
many nations, even torture. Interviews with several people directly
familiar with the conditions of Manning's detention, ultimately
including a Quantico brig official (Lt. Brian Villiard), who confirmed
much of what they conveyed, establishes that the accused leaker is
subject to detention conditions likely to create long-term
psychological injuries.

December 7, 2010 -- "The
Australian government should defend and support Wikileaks and its
founder Julian Assange and their efforts to expose the lies,
duplicities and outright crimes of the US government and its allies",
said Peter Boyle, national convener of the Socialist Alliance on December 7.

"We condemn the Australian government for collaborating with the US government in hunting Julian Assange down. The exposure of classified US government cables and other material
by Wikileaks is an enormous plus for all those who are fighting for
truth and democracy, and against war and exploitation. Wikileaks and
Assange deserve our strongest support.

December 2, 2010 -- PolEconAnalysis -- There is a growing chorus of voices in the media and the academy singling out the actions of the Chinese state as central to the dilemmas of the world economy. This focus finds its most articulate presentations, not in the xenophobia of the right, but in the polite analysis of many left-liberals.

Paul Krugman, for instance, writing in the run-up to November’s G20 summit in South Korea, praised the United States’ approach of creating money out of nothing (“quantitative easing”) as being helpful to the world economy, and criticised the Chinese state’s attempts to keep its currency weak as being harmful.
“The policies of these two nations are not at all equivalent”, he
argues, adding his influential voice to the chorus which is increasingly
targeting China for the world’s woes.[1] Krugman’s, however, is a
simplistic analysis which overlooks the role of the US over decades in
creating huge imbalances in the world economy, and has the dangerous
effect of scapegoating one of the poorest nations of the world (China)
for the problems created by the world’s richest.

December 4, 2010 – Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal – Running an empire produces many nasty habits, habits that lead you to treat people, nations, assets and the environment as objects upon which to project your own power. The US government runs such an empire. As a result, innocent people die, the environment is ravaged and funds that could have been used to meet human needs have been fed into an insatiable military industrial complex. This has long been known by the socialist left and now, with the release and publication of secret US diplomatic messages, Wikileaks has made it visible to the entire world.

More than 50 people listened to Afghan democracy
activist, Malalai Joya (pictured second from left) call on the
Australian government to withdraw its troops at a November 12 anti-war
vigil in Melbourne. The protest included a spontaneous "die-in" and was
also addressed by Chip Henriss from Stand Fast and Dr Richard Tanter at
the RMIT Nautilus Institute. Photo: Chip Henriss.

Sunday, November 14, 2010 -- Green Left Weekly -- Malalai Joya is an Afghan feminist and
anti-war activist who opposes the US-led occupation of her country. An
opponent of both the Islamic fundamentalist Taliban and the equally
fundamentalist and corrupt warlords in the US-backed regime of President
Hamid Karzai, Joya was the youngest member elected to Afghan parliament
in 2005. She was suspended after she said the parliament was full of
warlords. Joya is touring Australia.

Malalai Joya visits a girls' school in Farah province in Afghanistan. Photo: AfghanKabul.

By Malalai Joya

October 10, 2010 -- rabble.ca -- In the United States, many looked to the ballot box and hoped for real change when Barack Obama was elected president in 2008.

To
be honest, I never expected that he would be any different for
Afghanistan than President George W. Bush. The truth is that Obama's war
policies have turned out to be even more of a nightmare than most
people expected. Obama talked a lot about hope and change, but for
Afghanistan the only change has been for the worse.

After almost
two years of Obama, the number of US troops occupying Afghanistan has
more than doubled. And the number of drone attacks in Pakistan has
increased. Obama's so-called surge of troops has resulted in increased
Afghan civilian deaths.

The documents released by Wikileaks
prove what we have been saying about war in Afghanistan. There are more
massacres by NATO forces than they wanted us to believe. Now the whole
world should know this war is a disaster.

We understand that the FBI seized computers, passports, books,
documents, cell phones, photos, financial records, diaries, maps and
other materials using warrants were issued under a 1996 statute which
made it a crime for US citizens to provide “material assistance” to any
organisation designated by the government as “terrorist".

We condemn these raids and demand that the property seized be
immediately returned and the victims of the raids be fully compensated.
We also call for the revocation of the anti-democratic grand jury
subpoenas against some of the raided activists.

We will also approach other organisations and activists to discuss
and plan solidarity with the activists now being victimised under US
"terrorism" laws.

[This is the slightly edited text of a talk presented to the Democratic Socialist Perspective and Resistance educational conference in Sydney in January 2002. Dave Holmes is now a leader of the Socialist Alliance
in Melbourne. This and other writings are also available at Dave Holmes' blog, Arguing for Socialism.]

By Dave Holmes

I'd like to begin with a
juxtaposition of two events — one which took place relatively recently
and the other a long time before.

By the Labour Party Pakistan (Karachi) and the National Trade Union Federation

August 20, 2010 -- The recent floods represent the worst disaster in Pakistan’s history.
The country has been devastated from the northern areas to its southern
tip. The state, stripped of its capacity to meet peoples’ needs by
neoliberalism and militarism alike, has been found wanting—both in its
longstanding failure to maintain existing infrastructure, and in its
response to the calamity.

The grassroots relief efforts that have emerged across the country
are heartening, but a crisis of this magnitude can only be handled by an
institution with the resources and reach of the federal government. As
in all disasters, the assistance of the military will be necessary—but
this must be subject to civilian oversight, and must not be exploited to
glorify the army at the expense of the government. The military’s
relative strength is a direct legacy of pro-amy federal budgets, and we
remember too well the failures of the Musharraf government in 2005.